1.Technical Field
The invention relates to apparatus for aligning tooling details, such as drill bonnets and the like, with a product detail, such as a section of an aircraft wing, during manufacture.
2.Background Art
In current aerospace industry practice, aircraft assemblies are manufactured by placing individual piece parts, or details, of the assembly in an assembly jig and performing one or more operations (such as drilling or riveting) on the inserted details. The individual piece parts or details are located and held in place by tools which are secured to the assembly jig. It is often necessary to remove one set of tools and install another set to manufacture another section of the assembly or to perform a different operation on the section of the assembly previously manufactured.
Because the tools required to manufacture an assembly are installed and removed manually, they are necessarily limited in size and weight so that shop personnel can lift and position them on the assembly jig. As a result, numerous separate tools are required to complete the manufacture of even small and non-complex aircraft assemblies, and the manufacturing process is labor-intensive, time consuming and costly. Additionally, although the tools are secured to the assembly jig in predetermined positions, the dimensional tolerances on individual locating and fastener holes for the plurality of tools used in an assembly operation make it impossible to insure that one aircraft assembly is dimensionally identical to another produced on the same jig. Because of the number of tools involved, it is not practical to verify tool alignment for manufacturing each assembly, and such alignment is typically verified only after some pre-established period of time, such as six months. Additionally, the assembly jig itself must be periodically surveyed to verify it is level. These operations are also time consuming, labor intensive, and costly.